


the fractal of a warrior

by cartoonmoomba



Series: I walked around the world until I found my gravestone [18]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-05 23:27:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13398519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartoonmoomba/pseuds/cartoonmoomba
Summary: She dreams, when she dies, and she watches the multitude of other hers in the abyss of Mother's realm live and love and die.





	the fractal of a warrior

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know, I just wanted to write something and have it vaguely connect to all the iterations of Lieal I've written, never had the chance to, or am currently writing. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

She dreams, when she dies.

Mother's abyss is endless as she drifts through constellations and dark space, pulled and pushed at the whims of this nebulous ocean. It is peaceful, this death. She closes her eyes. There is no foe here to take up arms against, no passerby flagging her down to assist with a menial task. No primal to fight, no empire to struggle with. She can breathe easy, let her body relax and a great sigh to escape her lips. She can rest.

The Warrior of Light can rest.

She does not want to leave.

.

.

She does not know how long she lets the current take her, pushing her up against some distant shore only to cradle her body and withdraw back. She sees things, on the beaches of these worlds: she sees herself, and Arbert, and a man she thinks might be Arbert, too. A girl she thinks might be herself but separate. Glimpses of her friends, not always the same and not always alive. Sometimes she is the one doing the healing - sometimes she is the one doing the killing.

She watches these people who are part of her life but also not as the ocean soothes her soul. There is her, as she was on that day that Dalamud fell: sixteen summers, bright eyed and frightened in the arms of a familiar man. Arbert, but not her Arbert. Yet he also is because she remembers him, all of a sudden in this space between worlds: the man she loved, and lost, and forgot. The man who died a villain in some other world only to come into her life as a ghost, unknown to her as he was but his soul just as familiar. She sees this Arbert struggle on Carteneau Plains in the face of Bahamut's wrath and nearly fall, only to awaken in a time stream not his own. Her heart aches for him: she wonders where he is, if he still has his friends. She wonders if she's seen him and forgotten every time, an endless loop breaking his heart until he learns to walk away.

She hopes he is not alone. He never could handle loneliness well.

The ocean recedes and so does she, into the coastline of a different her. A scion of Darkness: the heir to a world she could not stop from death, her only hope a painful suicide to preserve her soul and travel at the Ascians' side. There is no Arbert in this world; there is no hero to stand up against her either, as she sails the galaxy in search of the source. She watches countless adventurers try to take her down only to fall to the sharp edge of her sword. A beastly thing: as large as her body, pulsing with a hunger she can feel from even here. There is madness in the smile her other self sends her, watching from the sand but not stepping foot into the black waters. She does not like this world - she mourns for the girl the gods let her become, and yet she also longs for that freedom from her Mother. For the touch of another, for the touch of power. For every realm of possibility at her fingertips, now that she is undying.

She lets the ocean pull her away with only a tinge of regret.

They - her and the ocean, her guide - continue for a time that is both infinite and over in the span of a second. Many hers, in many clothes, and many ages. One dies young before the mantle of Light can even fall on her shoulders. One finds love so strong it pulls her away from the battlefield and into a small Ul'Dahn cottage and the arms of a man who's face is lined with laughter. ( _He is not Arbert_ , she thinks.) There is a Sharlyan her with a nose in an arcanist's tome and a street brat risen to her potential under the guiding hand of the conjurers guild. Happy hers, crying hers, hers both living and dying and dead and then brought back with the conviction of those who chant her title. Immortal, eternal, and frightening. She sees lands she does not know names for and people in her embrace she has both met as strangers and never has and sometimes children and sometimes Ascians and sometimes the Scions broken before her and a moon descending red and swollen and angry and where she once watched Arbert be whisked away by the wish of an old man, she now finds herself in a world moved on without her.

Her mind spins. The galaxy is all her.  _Her her her her her her her her her_.

_Do I never get the chance to rest?_

It is peaceful, this death. She watches the others struggle and succeed and fail and be wiped from history and be cast unto a pedestal revered for ages to come. So many lives, so many stars, balanced on the fine edge of a knife. She wonders if there are other hers, passing by that she cannot see. She hopes their deaths have also brought them peace, and her lives have brought them closure.

Is that what she seeks in this death - closure? To whom? For what purpose? Who would she miss?

The Scions, yes: they are her friends. The few companions she's made over her travels too, she supposes. Would they miss her, or Her, the Warrior of Light?

 _Oh_ , she thinks with a start. She would miss Arbert. She wishes she could have kissed him more, loved him more - both the one she forgot and the one she fell in love with all over again. She would have liked to see him again, before departing on this journey.

She hopes he does not cry when the news come. He never could handle loneliness well.

 _Oh, Arbert,_  she thinks with a sigh.  _Come what may, we will always find each other. Our souls are bound throughout time and space._

She has indeed seen it - worlds where she prospers he is there, and worlds die when he is not.  _She_  dies when he is not. She is rather disgruntled to know this, that she is not allowed to succeed without him there. Has she not proven her worth enough?

( _To whom?_  The question comes.  _Who has judged my soul and found it incomplete?_ )

The ocean tides continue their languid trek and she, with them. She does not count the worlds, does not keep a ratio of living girl:dead girl. The emerald green of one star they come upon catches her attention with its luster and the vicious darkness she sees burning underneath, like corruption in the roots of a blooming tree. The her in this world is familiar: abandoned by family, adopted by some kind soul. She is raised in The Shroud and the elementals rule over her with an iron fist, whispering in her dreams and the waking world until she does not know their voices from her mother's. Like a rabbit running from prey she canvasses the forest under their command, fingers buried in dirt and roots and animal carcasses as she heals best she can. An Arbert watches her from the shadows of a castrum, and his fate chases after her until they are older and she is bitter and he is too and both have nowhere to go. So they go somewhere together, until they part helplessly in love but hopelessly idealistic. She's dying and refuses to stop; he's been dead and wants to learn how to live. They cannot help each other so their love is reduced to mail and linkpears and bone aching longing.

She likes these two, she decides, who have finally separated enough to try and succeed individually. He is learning and thriving but she is -  _stubborn_ , as she usually is. A horrid creature offers her its hand and she, in her ever consistent naïveté and self sacrifice, offers herself to it in exchange for power. She uses the power to help others, certainly, but it is still power and she has always been a little (a lot) selfish. She knows this her will die regardless of what path she tries to take - and when she does indeed die, she watches the creature mourn the loss of the one it had loved and then bring her back again and again and again, each time emptier than the last. They do not realize it, for they think they have found a loophole to mortality. But no one is meant to live forever.

Not even the Warrior of Light.  _Certainly_  not the Warrior of Light.

The world must have balance.

A tug comes at her soul, pulling her attention from watching hers and Arbert's lovestory meet yet another tragic end (a regular Romeo and Juliet they are, she thinks of a play she once watched). The water parts around her to allow a light to shine through, tendrils reaching for her like an insistent sea monster wanting to trap her in its jaws.

 _The jaws of life_ , she thinks morbidly.  _The jaws of balance_.

Her death had skewered the balance back at - wherever she had come from, in this brilliant abyss of hers. She thinks she had fallen in a battle of great importance, where she was likely leading the charge or some sort. It sounds like something she was expected to do.  _How disappointing_ , she thinks. She had hoped to stay dead this time. She knows it is possible - but alas, the her that she is is not allowed such a sweet escape.

The ocean reflects the light of the stars. She closes her eyes and gives up her rest. In the darkness of her eyelids she can see that creature embracing the other her, crooning over her dead body and pulling it together piece by piece until like a mammot, she once more springs to life.

 _Oh_ , Lieal laughs, tired and grim.  _What we all do for love._

The ocean dries up and she swallows desert dirt.

.

.

(When she returns from the field where she had fallen and been revived in with the incantation of a white mage starting before her body even hit the ground, it is Arbert she sees first. It is his arms that grip her first, his voice that greets her first. And in his eyes, when she pulls back, she sees the universe of  _them_ and consoles herself with the fact that he has seen it, too.)


End file.
